When grief has no clear shape: A personal story of family loss and pandemic reflection

Back in the depths of the pandemic, when grief and loss was all around us – and when so many people were facing bereavement in isolation, often without the rituals that help us process it – I realised that my younger sibling, if they had lived, would be turning 50 in the world of lockdown. In many ways, the pandemic brought into sharp focus how grief does not disappear with time; it shifts, resurfaces and finds new language when the world around us mirrors it. I wonder what my sibling would have made of it had they had that half century with my sister, myself and our families?

I think of what pleasures and pains would have been created if I had always had the youngster beneath me in the family. I wonder how my own life experience would have been altered by being their big brother? I wouldn’t have been the youngest in the family.

Arrival

I first heard about their coming when my rather large bedroom in the eaves of the house I grew up in was ready to be divided to accommodate the newest member of our household. I clearly remember how my parents began to manipulate my thinking in preparation for the forthcoming building works. It was “going to be fun” having a smaller room, they tried to persuade me. I’d “get to choose that bedspread” – the one that represented the cockpit of a racing car, if I’d “just give up my protests, see sense and take a positive view”. Of course, being a child, I didn’t really understand what was going on, and I certainly didn’t understand why my older sister was getting to keep a room of her own with all of her stuff and things in it. There would be no consequence of reduced space for her. I was very resistant and, although I have to say this myself, I can still see exactly why!

(In therapy, we often return to these early moments – not because the practical details matter most, but because they show us how children intuit change long before they can understand loss. The body and emotions often register what the mind cannot yet process.)

Assault

Skip forward a few months and a different message was circulating in my life. Unseen, but not unfelt by me, my mother had lost the baby that was due in the family. Suddenly my peace was being shattered by another direct assault on my space: apparently, there was someone already in existence who might be coming to share my room. The audacity! An adopted child – whatever that meant. We were now expecting a cuckoo!

(Many families, during both personal and global crises like COVID-19, move quickly to “fill the gap” or restore balance after a loss. Yet grief rarely follows such timelines. It lingers beneath decisions, shaping them in ways that may only become visible years later.)

Consequences

As it happens, the cuckoo-child never arrived. But as time followed on I was next introduced to the idea of emigration to Australia, where we would all “get new lives”.

The changes seemed to mount and I really didn’t like all of this unsettled social soup that we were living in. Most noticeably, my mother’s health began to deteriorate – her body quietly rejecting something else. Loss in her was transformed from being well into chronic painful illness.

(We now understand more clearly how unprocessed grief can live in the body. During the pandemic, many people experienced not only emotional distress but physical symptoms – fatigue, pain and illness – reminding us that loss is not just something we think about, but something we carry.)

Casualties

By the time a full seven years had passed from the loss of the child we were finally moving – but it wasn’t across the globe. Leading up to this move, the basement of our house, in which my “aunt” lived, was converted into a self-contained flat. A new bathroom was created on the ground floor, and then the three upper floors that had been my family home were split to form yet more self-contained properties. My “aunt”, a casualty of this change, moved out. It was a personal loss.

On the day before I started a new secondary school, we moved to a small house well away from my friends. It seemed that for seven years one loss became another. Loss transformed until it couldn’t be clearly seen what was actually missing anymore.

(This layering of loss is something many people have recognised in recent years: one grief compounding another, until it becomes difficult to disentangle what is being mourned. The pandemic, for many, was not a single loss but an accumulation – of people, routines, identities and imagined futures.)

Decomposition

Imaginations and dreams gave way to decomposition as I watched my father retreat into what I would later realise was depression and finally a debilitating stroke. My once-safe, comforting mother had, by then, almost totally dissolved into pain and anger, which she regularly pushed out onto those around her.

(In families, grief rarely belongs to just one person. It moves relationally shaping moods, silences, roles and identities. As therapists, we often help people see not only their own grief but the ecosystem of grief they grew up within.)

Containment

When both my parents were in their final phases of life I dared to fully and directly bring up the loss of the youngest member of our family. My mother and I came to a rapprochement but in real terms it was “too late”, too hidden, for my father, who “hardly remembered” he said. My child that had sought the adult answers continued to be denied the required explanations, but therapy had already helped to give the events a narrative by which to understand the family loss, pain, anxiety and depression.

(One of the enduring impacts of COVID-19 has been the number of “unfinished conversations” –goodbyes not said, stories not shared, meanings not made in time. Therapy can become a space where those missing conversations are, in some way, still allowed to happen.)

Having permanently returned to my home city the year before the “golden” anniversary of all that loss, I allowed myself to wonder what different path there might have been if that younger sibling of mine had made it through.

These imagined lives – the “what ifs”– are not signs of being stuck, but expressions of continuing bonds. We do not simply let go of those we lose; instead, we find evolving ways to hold them in our inner world.

RIP Little One.

Much love,
Your brother

A gentle reflection

If you recognise something of your own story in this – perhaps not one clear loss, but many that seem to blur into one – then you might pause with a few questions:

What losses in your life feel unfinished or not fully spoken about?
Are there “what if” stories you still carry, quietly or persistently?
Where might grief have shown up indirectly – in the body, in relationships or in life decisions?
And who, if anyone, has been able to hear these parts of your story with you?

Grief does not follow a straight line and it rarely keeps to one moment in time. Sometimes it waits –years or decades – until there is enough space, safety or support to be felt and understood. If you feel I might be the right therapist for you then feel welcome to reach out.

This is an adapted blog originally written for and published on the “Three men and a blog” therapy blog project in 2020.

All rights reserved © Copyright Duncan E. Stafford 2020. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from the authors of this post is strictly prohibited. Author contact via website Contact page.